You may have noticed some new colors on the schedule board
these relate to appointment records you can also see them in the legend. now a
common problem that schedulers have is that availability information can be
scattered across different tools you have bookings showing up in
the schedule board you had appointments being created in Customer Service Hub
or through the field service timeline for instance and those were not being shown
up on the schedule board unless you were using a legacy feature which we've
deprecated now which was to create a booking for an appointment and then show
that because the schedule board was only showing bookings but now you don't
have to use that feature and that feature had its own issues because you
know if you moved if you say made changes in bookings and
the changes in the appointments wouldn't happen
and and vice versa there were several issues there so now we directly integrate
appointments uh dataverse appointments into Outlook dataverse appointments
can be not just the ones created in dynamics but if you are using Power
platforms server side synchronization then you can manually uh track certain
outlook appointments by you know there's a track to Dynamics 365 category
that shows up in Outlook and then if you track from Outlook then they will come in
the appointments dataverse entity and then they will also show here.
So now your dispatcher doesn't have to look at Outlook have to look at the
service calendar and have to look at the field service schedule board they
just look at the schedule board and they are seeing information from various
places integrated in one place uh so appointments that are busy and completed
will be uh treated as unavailable for scheduling so you won't be able to
schedule over those appointments cannot be moved on the schedule board
because you know for instance you wouldn't want a dispatcher moving
somebody's say outlook appointment that they set so we disable that and so
read only and then if you do it try to do it you will get a message the appointment's
can't be moved. Let's take a look at how we set this up so you'll have to go
into settings you'll have to go to scheduling parameters and it's a simple
setting here you just have to switch it to yes uh when you turn it to yes
You'll get an informational dialog as well and just click yes click save
and then this will turn it on for all resources but if you would like to opt out
certain resources you don't want to show their appointments on the
schedule board and not have them considered in scheduling then you
can simply go to the resource you can a particular resource and you can
go to the scheduling tab and you'll see this field this field is only visible if the
field and schedule the org level field and scheduling parameters was on so if
that was yes then you will see it at the resource level as well it's by default yes
but you can turn it to no uh and opt out certain resources you can do a
bulk edit for a number of resources and that way you will have control.
Now once you have set it up let's actually create an appointment so
and let's see it surface on the schedule board.
So here I'm going to do sync with Adatum corporation and I'm going to say
uh so John is the person who's logged in right now he's actually adding he's
adding Brandon as required um let's just say this is later in the day maybe 4 to 4:30
and let's save it.
And now let's go to our Schedule board.
And here you go.
The sync with datum that we just created at four 4 p.m is showing up on the schedule
board because we turned it on at the resource level and turning it on at
the resource level turned it on for all at the org level
which turned it on for all resources.
Now let's take a look at how um scheduling respects it.
So for wave 1 2021 if you have resource scheduling optimization then all of the
Resource Scheduling Optimization uh call like the embedded optimizer calls
will respect it so for instance I'm doing a suggest and this is calling the embedded
optimizer and you will note that uh it it doesn't uh schedule around
uh it schedules around the appointments it doesn't schedule over them so the
suggestion was for instance not coming here and
another thing you can do is
is to see this in the batch mode so if you've got an RSO schedule and you
want to run it uh you know you set up a schedule you run and then I've already ran
one and you can see here a little bit more clearly that these were appointments the
ones in red and it has scheduled around these so this is the way that you can
have appointment scheduling respected appointments respected in Resource
Scheduling uh and one question that we might have is like you know we uh
we use if you use find availability from the old schedule board um so the find
availability APIs uh that support has been added so if you want to call the
find availability APIs yourself with appointments you could do that and
we will be bringing find availability appointments with uh find
availability to the new schedule board in Wave 2.
And in that case if you are a non-RSO customer and you want
the scheduling apis to respect it then note that
you should be able to do that in wave 2 2021.